


Your wand is [somewhere else]

by Anonymous



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, Character Study, Cooking, Hurt No Comfort, POV Second Person, POV Taako (The Adventure Zone), angus good boy, glamour springs, no Actual Lup mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-19 12:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22710544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Kudos: 17
Collections: Anonymous





	Your wand is [somewhere else]

You've abandoned your wand somewhere far, far out of reach of you in preparation for your task. You, Taako, are standing in front of the main kitchen counter. Angus is on a beanbag, the red one in the corner, reading a book with a red spine and gold lettering. You think it’s one of the transmutation books you lent him. You feel sick.

The counter in front of you isn’t empty - it rarely is. But today it’s covered with an assortment of basic ingredients, ones you’d picked, but hadn’t bought personally. And, unless Garfield had a personal vendetta to fill -which, you think, is actually pretty fucking likely - they were, 100%, fit for use, arsenic free guaranteed or your money fucking back! And aside from Angus, the kitchen had been cleared of personnel for your use. Lucretia had even (reluctantly) given you permission to put up a bright neon sign on the door and everything, to tell people - fairly politely, might you add - to fuck off.

Motivation is hard to come by, these days, and that’s saying quite a lot for you, considering you’ve lacked it for most of your life to begin with. Really, the boy detective is only in the room because at least he knows to keep out of Taako’s private business and you'd felt hard-pressed to accommodate after blowing off a magic lesson that very day. It’s also the fact that- in front of others, you’re practically hard-wired to keep up a front, and your front? It’s the only fucking thing keeping you going. Lastly, you’ve already tried cooking in front of Magnus and Merle, but fuck, you threw in the towel so fucking quickly, you're almost ashamed of yourself. Almost.

So you start- breaking the seal on the flour packet, tipping it carefully into a bowl, placing the bowl on the scales, writing down the measurement, taking the bowl off. Easy. Simple. You may clench your fingers to your palms as you let go of it, but honestly, this had already gone way better than you expected, which is usually the first sign that something's gone very, very wrong.

You press on regardless, because fuck if you aren't at least going to pretend everything's okay, measuring all the ingredients out (all the seals unbroken, untouched - you’re careful to not let anything touch your bare skin) and Angus has taken to making notes in your book, his tongue out as he avidly reads and writes, comfortable in your presence. You can't find it in you to be mad, nor surprised. He hasn’t looked at you once. You’re thankful, you think.

Thirty minutes have passed.

Your wand is, still, far, far away from you. You haven’t touched anything that will be consumed; you didn’t even buy the ingredients! You can say- well, you _could_ say with certainty that they were harmless. You totally could! And even if the thought is crossing your mind, tempting you, grabbing at you and pulling- tasting separate ingredients - the idea of putting a spoonful of fucking flour in your mouth - is stupid and idiotic and you have an image to uphold. You don’t _need_ to it that because you know everything you’ve put in these bowls and you know it would make so much more sense taste it when it's done and you've got a plateful of thick chocolate chip cookies destined for the fucking bin steaming in front of you and the sickness rises up until, you taste bile in your throat-

Sometimes, just sometimes, you can’t even set the ingredients out. You can’t even bear the fucking idea of handling anything edible that those- anyone would eat

And in your head a memory replays of the years before Glamour Springs. You see yourself mixing the butters and sugars together. You hear yourself screeching in disbelief as a hand _(oh so similar to yours, the way the fingers bend and curve and the warm brown reflects that of your own skintone-)_ dips a finger in before raising it to a mouth and imparting lips as you utter your disgust-

And you see yourself preheating an oven, one you know existed only in your early childhood, just a little hotter than recommended because today was one of those days you experimented with recipes and waiting for the tray of rounded dough to be passed to you by _(the heart of your still beating body, the heart you've lost and not yet found-)_

  
You see yourself with a plate of warm, gooey, chocolate chips, delight coursing through you as you raise your hand to meet another, but only in your head because right now? Right now, you’re standing in a _pristine_ fucking kitchen, bowls of ingredients measured out in front of you, the oven off, with a clock ticking down, and down, and down, down, down, down down _down_

You don’t know why you believed you could do this.

An hour has passed.

A ragged sigh strangles it's way through your throat and you know there is a grief you cannot recognise coiled around your heart. 

You turn, hands on your hips as you exude disinterested air. You hear yourself asking Angus what he's learned, and whether he can cast more than a cantrip yet. He doesn't ask about the counter now behind you and leaves three hours later practically glowing with the feeling of a shiny new level 1 spell under his belt. Your nonchalance melting away as he leaves you, alone save for your incomplete project. You want to cry and the sickness is rising again and it's all becoming too much so you take a single breath, and leave. 


End file.
